The German Basic Law is open for an interpretation that would allow the Constitutional Court to test the normative adequacy of most statutes. If the court does, it could be modelled as the supervisor of the legislator, i.e., of the agent of the people. The model predicts collusion between the...

This article examines whether the judges of the French Constitutional Court demonstrated partisanship when ruling on the validity of the elections to the lower house of the French Parliament between 1958 and 2005. It uses a new dataset on the decisions of the Constitutional Court which takes...

Social choice theory understands a voting rule as a mapping from preferences over possible outcomes to a specific choice or choices. However, actual election procedures often do not have this structure. Rather, in a typical election, although the outcome is an assembly comprising several people...

The pros and cons of stricter disclosure rules for parliamentarians are hotly debated. Some argue that disclosure rules for parliamentarians increase transparency of the legislative branch, leading to lower levels of rent-seeking and corruption, increased citizen trust in parliament, and better...

The German Basic Law is open for an interpretation that would allow the Constitutional Court to test the normative adequacy of most statutes. If the court does, it could be modelled as the supervisor of the legislator, i.e., of the agent of the people. The model predicts collusion between the...

Some numbers in the political sphere seem to be chosen rather arbitrarily. One example might be the rule set out by the Second Senate of the German Federal Constitutional Court in 1995 that the overall tax load on assets must be limited to 50% of the yield on those assets. This rule was...